


Yorkshire Cats

by bearundersiege



Category: History Boys (2006), History Boys - All Media Types, History Boys - Bennett
Genre: Alternate Universe - Crack, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, Mentions of Past Animal Abuse, Mentions of pet abandonment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-26
Updated: 2015-09-26
Packaged: 2018-04-23 12:00:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4876030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bearundersiege/pseuds/bearundersiege
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dorothy can't stop taking in strays. </p><p>(Alternatively, the boys are cats. That's it, that's the plot.)</p><p>Literal Cat AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Yorkshire Cats

**Author's Note:**

> Not really sure why I thought this was a good idea but it's just chilling on my hard drive so... erm, yes. 
> 
> This fic is not set in Yorkshire. I'm not sure it's set in any real place at all other than a vaguely realised countryside, so be warned. 95% of the cat behaviours exhibited in this fic are based on cats that my family owns or has owned in the past. 
> 
> Warnings: The things in the tags, but also unbeta'd and un-Britpicked. If something is really bugging you, please leave a comment below and I'll try to fix it!

There are only two at first, tiny things barely old enough to open their eyes, fur sparse and shivering in the cold. They don’t know where they’d come from, whether an abandoned litter or some prick who thought them pests and left them on a stranger’s garden to catch their deaths. 

Frank had gone to clear out the barn when he returns not ten minutes later, huffing white puffs of air against the gloom of dawn as he braces himself against the doorway. 

“What’s happened?” Dorothy asks, leading him to the table. He loots the cabinets for a kitchen towel before settling down and producing, from either of his pockets, the first members of what would become their enormous family. 

“Poor things,” he says in his soft high voice, incongruous in combination with his Father Christmas-like physique. “I’m not sure they’ll last until noon.” She squeezes his shoulder and sends out a prayer to whoever is listening that they do. 

They hold on, tenuously, in the long drive to the vet, then the next day, then for a few days more. Then a week—two, three—turns to a month, turns to two, and Dorothy and Frank find themselves the owners of two long-haired cats whose primary interest involves pouncing on whatever dangly thing can be seen from their bed. 

Frank is the one who suggests she name them after old students. 

“I know how much you miss teaching and the boys,” he says, tapping the cats’ noses softly. Neither of them ever said it, but they hadn’t wanted to name the kittens because they had been so weak, and losing them after admitting attachment had seemed somehow more devastating. “No matter how much you complain about their dreadful essays.”

She thinks it over and eventually, names them after her favourite students: Rudge, a shy, quiet boy from eight years ago who went on to study maths at Warwick, becomes the namesake of the kitten slightly bigger than his brother, white with a bushy black tail and a spill of black fur on his back, and Akhtar, whose stiff formality melted to gushing when asked about film soundtracks, lends his name to the brown tabby with white socks and alert green eyes.

~*~*~  


Dorothy is inspecting the lavenders when the sky dims. Thick clouds have begun to inch over the sun and she wraps her cardigan tighter around her as the wind picks up, whipping her hair back. Large as the garden is, she hasn’t strayed far enough to make the walk back long, but when the eerie sensation of being followed doesn’t fade, she ducks behind a tree and waits. 

A tuxedo kitten comes into her line of vision a few moments later, slim and about five months old. It looks around, wondering where she’s gone. When she emerges from her hiding place, it runs up to her and meows, winding between her legs and rubbing its head against her boots. 

“Well, aren’t you handsome,” she says, bending down to scratch it between the ears. It purrs in response. 

He follows her back to the house, and whatever worry she carries about Akhtar and Rudge’s response to the stranger cat dissipates when it goes up to Rudge and begins a playful—if rather vigorous—wrestling match. It tries to include Akhtar, but he seems content to simply watch, though he allows the tuxedo cat to play with his tail, flicking it about until the other kitten is panting from all the play. 

By the time Dorothy brings out food (with an extra bowl for the boys’ new friend), the tuxedo cat is gone, and Akhtar and Rudge have gone back to annoying whatever tiny creature they’ve found near the rosebushes. 

She sees it twice more after that, the first after she finishes weeding and the second, while she is repotting a basil. It only stays long enough to eat the second time but by then, she (and Akhtar and Rudge) is completely charmed. 

“How would you like to stay with us?” she asks. It looks up and meows, then runs off, abandoning Rudge’s offer to play with his new toy mouse. Dorothy sighs, herding the boys inside the house as thunder booms in the distance. She hopes the kitten finds shelter until the storm passes, at least. 

The next few days are particularly difficult for Akhtar, the only cat she knows who hates boxes—the house included. When the last few clouds have cleared, Akhtar shoots past her out the door and lies down in the mud. 

“You’re going to have a bath after this,” she informs him. He meows and rolls over onto his other side. From the corner of her eye, she sees something moving in their direction. 

The tuxedo cat is back, impossibly muddier than even Akhtar and running as fast as its legs could carry it. Following is a stocky kitten around the same age, bright striped orange tail waving along behind. When they reach her, the tuxedo cat meows, glances at its companion, and looks up at her expectantly. 

She kneels down to inspect the newcomer. Though the mud has turned most of it brown, a bath will return its fur to white, with splashes of colour on its ears and a spot of orange near its tail, making the base of its body look an exclamation mark. The tuxedo cat comes between them and begins grooming its friend. 

“Does this mean you want us to take both of you in?” It purrs and rubs against her leg, which she takes as a yes. 

In the end, she sticks them all in the bath, even Rudge, who meows plaintively, flicking water her way. By the time the new kittens are dry and napping on a warm towel, Frank has come back from the barn and is armed with two mugs of tea. 

“Two?” he asks, handing her a mug. 

“He brought his friend along,” she says, sighing as it warms her hands. “I couldn’t turn them away.” 

He nods. “What will you call them?” 

She runs a finger over the tuxedo cat. “This one is Dakin,” The other kitten raises his head, and she reaches over to pet him too. “And this one is Scripps."

~*~*~  


Crowther, Timms, and Lockwood arrive two months after Scripps and Dakin, and all within a fortnight. 

Lockwood is first. 

While Dakin would play with both Rudge and Akhtar, his favourite cat to bother is Scripps, who suffers his attentions with patience and follows him around when he’s being particularly excitable about something. Scripps is easy to find—if there is a warm towel or a patch of sunlight (or, when he hasn’t a choice, a space near the heater), he is there, napping, and it’s only in relation to him that Dorothy and Frank ever know where Dakin is. So when three days have gone and Scripps’ naps remain undisturbed, Dorothy grows suspicious. 

She finds him wrestling a calico among the wildflowers, nipping at it until the calico stumbles over something that sends the both of them tumbling at her feet. She raises an eyebrow at Dakin, who meows at her and circles his new friend. 

“You take in more strays than I do.” She reaches out to pet the calico, which looks at her and walks away, sitting just out of arm’s reach. Puzzled, she tries again. It keeps still until she is just shy of touching it, and walks off. Dorothy tries twice more and is met with the same response, leaving her torn as to whether she finds it hilarious or frustrating. It follows them back anyway, and the other cats take to it with ease. 

The builders have started work on the barn when she finds Timms. 

It is her grandniece’s idea, converting the barn into a guesthouse to rent out, and with so little to do after retirement, she agrees. If she could manage teenage boys for forty years, she can bloody well manage a guesthouse. 

“There’s a website called Airbnb you can list it on,” Fiona had said, Dakin purring contentedly on her lap as she rubbed his chin. “I’ll help you with it once the renovations are done.” 

Dorothy goes down to the lake just on the edge of their property to get away from the noise and finds an odd sight: a large, cream tabby with ducklings tucked all along its side. The cat notices her first, the ducklings swivelling their heads to see what’s caught its attention. Dorothy thinks it looks rather like the Cheshire Cat. 

“Hello,” she says. The cat bends its head to lick a fidgeting duckling. “Are they yours?” 

A splashing answers her question. From the lake emerges a duck, walking up to the cat and quacking, which the cat returns with a soft, rumbling meow. The ducklings slide away from their caretaker and waddle after their mother, the cat remaining a lone unmoving loaf in the middle of the grass. 

“How curious,” is all she says. 

The next three days finds the cat with various animals on its person. On the first day, a frog sits on top of its head, tongue flicking to catch the fly buzzing about the cat’s ear. The second day, a snail sits on its paw, eyestalks waving in the wind. On the third, a host of sparrows have turned it into a perch, the cat shifting slightly when their talons catch its skin. 

It follows her home after that. She likes to think that it thought she is an animal worth adopting, but most likely it’s because she’d given it the tin of tuna she had intended for Scripps. 

Crowther is really only theirs in the most tangential sense of the word. 

There is only one thing Scripps loves more than napping, and it is following people and watching them as they work. Dorothy often says that her gentlest boy is also the most curious, and no one who has been around Scripps will refute her. With so many new people around the barn, Scripps often misses dinner, so Dorothy leaves a bowl of food near the barn, where he can easily see it. 

One night, she notices how fast and how much he’s eating, and she waits until the dishes have been cleared and the cats have gone back to playing to check what’s wrong. He goes boneless in her arms, blinking sleepily as she pokes and prods at him. 

“You don’t seem to be getting fatter,” she informs Scripps, lifting him to eye level. He doesn’t fidget—he never does when picked up—but it is awkward to handle him in that position, so Dorothy lets him down. “Why are you eating so much? It isn’t as if I don’t leave food out for you everyday.” 

The question is answered the next day when, upon leaving the house, Dorothy and Frank find not Scripps, but a sleek black cat at the food bowl. It isn’t so much the appearance of a stranger cat that surprises her, but that the other cats seem to know it, judging by the way Rudge is attempting to draw the black cat into a wrestling match, and how it is tolerating Lockwood gnawing at its leg. 

Frank chuckles. “Who would’ve thought we’d turn into a cat rescue centre in our old age?” 

Certainly not her. 

~*~*~  


Dorothy doesn’t like to think about how Posner and Irwin first came to them, because she remembers the ragged, broken things they were, half-starved and bleeding. 

Posner is first. Scripps brings him to their attention by meowing, something he has never done, and rather loudly at that. He paces around Frank’s ankles until they run after him behind the barn. 

There is a kitten, batting a large crow away, its fur puffed tall. Frank moves to shoo the crow when Scripps—sweet-tempered, affable Scripps, who frequently allows the other cats to steal his food and Dakin to use him as a bed—runs up to the crow and hisses, swiping at its wing. The crow is big, but Scripps is stocky and angry, so it squawks one last time and flies off. Scripps immediately goes back to the kitten and nuzzles it gently. 

Dorothy gets a horrible flashback to when they’d first found Rudge and Akhtar when she sees the kitten. Its orange fur is clumped together by either mud or blood, and the splash of white on its neck is barely visible because of it. It almost scratches Frank when he reaches out, but Scripps lays a paw on it gently, and it, though reluctantly, allows itself to be inspected and later, taken to the vet. 

Not two weeks later, Scripps leads her to another stray, this time an older cat, limping along the pots of basil and chewing on the leaves. 

Dorothy hears her heart break when she sees it, fur matted, one eye almost swollen shut. It’s the collar that does it, she thinks, with the name and contact details scratched off, hanging on a neck that’s now too thin to hold it up. Its pattern reminds her of Dakin’s, but with blue fur instead of black, and the white under part restricted to its chest. It flinches when she comes close, but doesn’t attack her, and she calls Frank to bring the pet carrier around for another visit to the vet. 

It takes a while before Posner and Irwin are comfortable enough to interact with them and the other cats. Posner sticks close mostly to Scripps and Akhtar, who wins him over by teaching him how to hunt crickets in the garden. Irwin’s eye and leg heals, and he eventually joins the other cats for meals and socialising. Dakin, forever forward in his affections, scares him; Dorothy finds Irwin huddled behind the settee more than once, Dakin meowing at him to come out and play. 

~*~*~  


The barn construction is finished by the time the cats have settled on a routine. Posner, in the mornings, will follow Dakin and Lockwood until Dakin inevitably gets annoyed and cuffs him around the ears for his trouble. He will either sulk off to join Akhtar (and sometimes Timms) by the lake or go to Scripps, who will shift so Posner can have the better spot of sunshine, his handsome orange coat gleaming in the light.

Rudge and Akhtar have an ongoing competition to see who can bring home the better Dead Thing from the garden. So far, she’s had nine crickets, seven lizards, and two frogs, and she hopes they stop soon. There is nothing more alarming than waking up with a Dead Thing in front of one’s bedroom door.

(Also, she doesn’t like the way Rudge has been eyeing Felix the pigeon. She resolves to find them more stimulating toys.)

Timms continues his babysitting services for the surrounding wildlife and becomes particularly close to a vole and a badger. Akhtar trusts them only because Timms does, while Posner is happy to accommodate their new friends. Dorothy reckons he just thinks they are strange-looking cats. 

Crowther, who comes home thrice a week, is always caked in dirt and finds himself in the bath more often than he’d like. Sometime during his trips, he has learned to play dead, and will fall dramatically to the ground when he sees the tub. When he is feeling particularly histrionic, his tongue will stick out while staring at Frank with unblinking eyes, though his tail continues to twitch. 

Irwin finds a new escape location in the form of the barn’s gable window. Nobody knows how he gets up there, but Dorothy is first made aware of this when Dakin hasn’t stopped meowing in a half hour, and she gets distracted from her work in the garden. When she follows the sound to the barn, she sees him looking mournfully up at Irwin, sitting up on the windowsill, his tail hanging off the edge. 

“Irwin, darling, please come down,” she says, Dakin meowing in agreement. Irwin just looks at them, the light casting his shadow on the floor below. No amount of cajoling gets him to come down, and he only ever leaves when he is certain no one is watching. Dorothy finds this out by attempting to bribe him with tuna. The wait is long, the barn without yet a heater, and she goes back to the house to get a cup of tea. When she returns, he is already down, and has finished the tuna besides. 

Most of the people who rent the barn are couples from the city, eager to escape work and stress for the weekend. She asks Fiona to make special note of the cat situation, especially Irwin’s window perch. They haven’t yet encountered any trouble. 

(Almost, once. The woman and her husband have told her not to worry about it, but she still feels bad. Dakin, evidently, dislikes it when people pay Irwin too much attention in his presence. Whether this is due to some sense of proprietorship over the other cat or ire that people dare pay Irwin more attention when he is near isn’t clear, though Dorothy suspects it’s a bit of both. In any case, he’d left a rather nasty gash on the woman’s arm, and Dorothy had to separate him from the others for a time to discipline him.) 

On one occasion, Dorothy is surprised to find that their guests are the human David Posner and his wife, Hannah, who rents the barn out in her name. 

Posner the human hugs her when she introduces him to his namesake, and lifts Posner the cat onto his shoulder when he circles his ankle.

“He isn’t much like me though, is he?” Posner says, stroking the cat’s chin. She looks at them, Posner the human whose big body just barely accommodates his heart and Posner the cat who suffers Dakin’s rebuffs everyday and still finds warmth enough for the other cats, Frank, and Dorothy.

“Yes,” she says, wondering at the burst of affection she feels for them both. “He really is.” 

~*~*~  


There are other things more, but she doesn’t yet know whether to include them in her accounts. Things like the guests making a game of finding out how Irwin gets on the window and Irwin thwarting all their plans to discover him, Posner’s spending more time with Scripps than tailing after Dakin. Rudge winning the hunting competition by bringing home a pigeon (though thankfully not Felix), and one night, while cleaning, Dorothy realising that there are two cat shadows on the floor and upon looking up, finds that Dakin has joined Irwin on the sill, the latter suffering his enthusiastic grooming. 

She supposes she will write them down sometime, but for now, this is enough.

**Author's Note:**

> In memory of Kai (2004-2015). You are missed, fierce empress cat.


End file.
